{"id":99565,"date":"2021-06-24T05:43:55","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T11:43:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=99565"},"modified":"2021-06-24T08:01:19","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T14:01:19","slug":"house-wrens-an-unexpected-delivery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/24\/house-wrens-an-unexpected-delivery\/","title":{"rendered":"House Wrens – An Unexpected Delivery"},"content":{"rendered":"

It wasn’t what<\/em> was delivered that was unexpected. It was how<\/em> it was delivered.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Two days ago I revisited the nesting House Wren pair in the mountains that I posted photos of recently. Today’s photos were taken on that second visit.<\/p>\n

In House Wrens the only contribution males usually make to building the nest is adding a few twigs at the very beginning of the process. The rest of nest building, including the construction of the soft lining of the nest cup, is the responsibility of the female. After all, only females incubate so she’s the one who has to sit in that cup for what must seem like an eternity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For that reason I feel confident that this is the female of the pair. She’s about to deliver soft nesting material to their nest inside a rusty old pipe. It’s my best guess that this nesting material is a bundle of cottonwood ‘cotton’. That stuff seems to be almost everywhere these days.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Naturally I clipped a wing when she took off toward the nest.<\/p>\n

This particular delivery was uneventful. I’m only including these first two photos to document what stage the nest building process was in and to explain why I’m confident that the wren delivering soft nesting material to the nest was the female.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A few minutes later the male was on top of the pipe right next to the entrance to the nest. He was here for quite a while, seeming to mind his own business as he preened a little, sang a little and just hung out. He was here for long enough for me to take far more photos of him than I probably should have. It was a calm and relaxing scene.<\/p>\n

But suddenly I saw pandemonium through my viewfinder. At first I didn’t know what was going on – all I saw was a flurry of feathers and a bird or birds moving incredibly fast.<\/p>\n

The following three photos are sequential over a time span of 3\/10ths of a second.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The female had flown in with a beak-full of soft nesting material and displaced the male from his perch. He was so surprised he jumped straight backward and nearly fell off the pipe.<\/p>\n

When the male jumped backward he jumped out of the range of my single active focus point for an instant so in this photo both birds are soft. But they’re sharp enough for the viewer to see what happened.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The male had to struggle to stay on the pipe. He was sliding down almost as fast as he was running up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In fact he’d jumped so far back he had to use his wings to keep from falling off.<\/p>\n

You’re probably wondering what the nesting material is. I did too so I zoomed in on one of my high resolution photos and I could clearly see the shaft and barbs of at least one feather – possibly a filoplume feather<\/a><\/span><\/span>. I suspect the rest of the mass is mostly dark down feathers but it’s possible that it’s mammal fur.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The female turned toward the nest entrance at the end of the pipe as the male got the hell out of her way.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

She soon disappeared in the pipe with her bundle of nesting material.<\/p>\n

I can’t tell you how surprised I was by the arrival of the female and the resulting pandemonium in my viewfinder. I’m just glad that my instincts told me to lay on my shutter button and ask questions later.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Addendum: <\/em><\/p>\n

In response to some of the comments below I’m including another version of photo #5. It’s a humongous crop but it allows us to clearly see what I strongly believe to be a feather which I’ve outlined in red. The shaft of the feather can be seen along with attached barbs. The rest of the mass may be dark down feathers or mammal fur. I’m just not sure.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It wasn’t what was delivered that was unexpected. It was how it was delivered.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,4592,391],"tags":[1704,137,5811,1573,211,1307,231,2046,311],"class_list":["post-99565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-house-wren-wrens","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-feathers","tag-female","tag-filoplume-feather","tag-house-wren","tag-male","tag-nest-building","tag-nesting-material","tag-troglodytes-aedon","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/house-wren-4692-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-pTT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}